The Artist As Critic

THOUGH art is one of civilization's chief defenses, the hammer that tries to keep the trolls in their place, and though artists are by nature makers, not destroyers, the artist ought not to be too civilized—that is to say, too meekly tolerant—especially toward other artists, who may be trolls in disguise. The artist's trade is essentially an unreasonable one, though he may reason about it. However reasonably he may talk, if the artist believes in what he's doing he cannot help but feel strongly, at least some of the time, about what he believes to be fraudulent art. If he can stand to do so, he should speak out, especially now, when so much art is fake. He should defend—with dignity but as belligerently as necessary—the artists whose work he values and attack with equal belligerence all that he hates. No one can do it for him, because the artist's character— the whole complex of his ideas and emotions—is his final authority on what is, and what is not, art. Except insofar as they are really artists, critics have, finally, no authority at all. Professional critics know about art precisely because they stand back from it as the artist cannot do. As a result they're judges of technique, apologists for some artist's vision, or abstract moral philosophers.

The music critic Barry Farrell once summed up the problem every decent critic faces when art makes one of its sudden, seemingly idiotic leaps, changing all the rules. He tells of his painful experience at a concert of "new works" by composers who refuse to compose, and he remarks, "Then, in the din, an unwelcome thought crossed my mind: none of these people was hearing what I heard. Here I was, with pad and earnest pencil, straining my ear to judge the talents of a musician who only rubbed balloons together. Did he rub badly? Well? Was it pretty? What did it mean?"

Only the true artist can know for sure, by the test of his emotions, whether some new, surprising venture that declares itself art is in fact art. That is what makes art such a nuisance, and why the role of the artist is so easy to counterfeit. When Duchamp said, "Art is whatever I say it is," he was telling the truth. When Andy Warhol says it, he's putting us on. Other artists may sometimes take a while to come around to a new, true form, as when Picasso was at first indignant at Lipchitz' use of paint on his sculptures and then two weeks later described the technique as a great discovery; but true artists do come around to true art eventually, becuase that is what the artist is: the one who knows art when he sees it.

Unfortunately, one can expect no precision—not even much agreement—in these matters, since the man who really knows cannot prove he knows. William Blake swore Joshua Reynolds was in the service of the devil, and it was true, though Reynolds got all the commissions. Brahms loved the waltzes of Strauss; snobs and fakes were aghast—and are still. Since bad art has a harmful effect on society, it should never go unchallenged; but since the bad artist (like the good one) is an artist at all only because he claims he is, and has gotten at least one other person to believe him, how is he to be challenged? The only available rules are those of the gunfighter.

Artists have been shooting at artists for centuries. It's a healthy sport if managed with a measure of civility, gun against gun, nothing personal or mean. Being forced to articulate and defend a position can make a bad artist better—people are more educable than we generally admit—and a stupid defense, though not always proof that the art is fraudulent, can alert people to the strong possibility that the artist is a fool, or emotionally cracked, or a philistine in cunning disguise. In any case, a little loud shouting between artists about art can bring the community back into the debate and thus, besides improving business, protect the world from arrogant pretenders who claim to be above mere mortal explanation—the Nietzsches of the arts, who think it the business of ordinary clods to blink, shut their mouths, and try to follow.

The gunfighting of artists is already common, of course. The fiercest and most interesting book reviews in the New York Times are by writers. My object here is therefore not to start up such gunfighting, or even to encourage it, but to make it a little more orderly, a little more deadly.

Art does not work rationally, not even the art of literature—though literary people are forever congratulating themselves on the fact that, unlike painters, sculptors, and musicians, they still know what's up. They hear of Bruce Conners finding a doll in a city dump and placing it in a moldering high chair, then moving it to a museum, where it is celebrated (in this case rightly) as a work of art, and they cry, delighted, that you can't get away with a thing like that in literature. Or they listen to music constructed out of electronic bleeps and street noises and they lean back comfortably, secure in their understanding that all this, though fools may enjoy it, is a sickness of the times. Literature cannot fall into such error because literature is language, and language is by nature a sane expression of consciousness. As a psychologist might put it, every remark from a sane man asserts that 1) a certain person is 2) communicating something 3) in some situation 4) to someone. Deny any one of these terms (let the speaker assert that he is not himself but Jesus Christ, or let him speak gibberish, or let him insist that the hospital is an airbase or that the person he addresses is Napoleon) and you have psychotic speech. The difference between true art and false, the smug maintain, is that true art is rational. Even superficially, the definition of psychotic speech ought to frighten the smug. The novelist always claims he's someone else, denies that communication is his purpose (often speaking what to the general reader seems gibberish), and makes up out of his own head both situation and audience.

"Art tells the truth," Chekhov says; according to Tolstoy, art tells the truth because it "expresses the highest feelings of man." These may well be two statements of the same thing, but whether they are or not, what do they mean? How do we apply them? A group of people from all over the world, all of whom describe themselves as artists and therefore may be, converge in Paris to chop apart an automobile and spread wet spaghetti on a woman who has taken all her clothes off. Is it true? What is the nature of the lofty feeling? Is this alleged happening less true, the feeling less lofty, than what we get out of the nearly impenetrable odes of Pindar, the comic quotation of the William Tell Overture in Shostakovich's Symphony no. 15, the stern Christianity of Njal's Saga or Gulliver's Travels, or the godless terror of John Hawkes' The Beetleleg?

The meaning of art is hard to define satisfactorily, as we've seen. If I want you to know what my childhood was like, I tell you stories—how my father used to go up and down our country road in the middle of winter on his wired-together Farmall tractor, plowing out our neighbors' driveways, getting no pay but talk and hot coffee; how my mother taught English to people who didn't like it much and how she retreated at last to teaching third grade; how she read aloud to my father when he milked the cows and sang harmony with him on The Old Rugged Cross; and how (let us say I'm so stupid as to say) all of us were intense and happy and more or less afraid of the dark. If you are a sociologist or philosopher or a representative of the government, you can reduce all this by analysis to a socio-economic description; in other words, a different kind of understanding. When you have done this as well as it can be done, I will say, perhaps irritably, that you've missed the whole point. If you patiently ask, Then what was the point? I tell more stories or retire in a funk.

Granting for the moment that the artist cannot say in strictly logical or mathematical language exactly what he means, let us go on to ask how he says whatever it is he says: how are some stories more true—that is, valid—than others? As you know, the picture of my childhood that I've just set down is a lie. I don't mean that it's fiction—it's more or less true as far as it goes— but that it's a distortion. To take the most obvious detail, the phrase "all of us were intense and happy and more or less afraid of the dark" is sentimental tripe, despite the clownish labor of the "more or less." It feels sentimental, downright creepy in fact. (Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign. Warhol. Philip Roth. The fellow who shoots himself, if he's still with us.) Saying the thing in the wrong way calls up wrong associations. The statement needs revision and a realized context, something that will rule out the sentimental cheapness—in other words, it needs, among other things, stories that will nail it down. It may be that I cannot make my meaning plain except by making up some situation that never really happened. It may be that I can only be plain by speaking as though I were a fool and thus forcing the reader to back off from me to where I want him (Chaucer's way). It may be that I can sneak up on my meaning by abandoning language altogether and howling at the reader in what would be called—in this case mistakenly—gibberish.

Whatever the method I end up choosing, and whether I "communicate" something true (my childhood) or something wholly made up (the childhood of Godzilla), it works or not depending on how it feels. This does not mean that all one feels uneasy about should be abandoned. Perfectly comfortable art is dead art, the product of an embalmed mind that has nothing to say to anyone, even the aesthetically dead. One is frequently uncomfortable telling the truth in a new way or for the first time. It's like saying with conviction that one has seen the Loch Ness monster when in fact one has. But there's a difference between the statement that feels disquieting—the statement that makes one feel "weird," mysteriously vulnerable—and the statement that simply feels creepy.

Making weird statements that one feels to be true and then trying to make them stick is art's way of coming to understanding. Or, to put it another way, though the artist may have a clear impression, he doesn't know until he finishes speaking exactly what it is that he will be forced to say.

Everyone has had the experience of listening to and struggling to take part in an argument in which somehow the truth keeps eluding its hunters. One sits nervously on edge, wide awake, sensing with every nerve end the truth that will not show itself, trying to put one's finger on where the speakers are going wrong, and at last, if one is lucky, recognizing, with a shock of relief, what it is that needs to be stated. No one who has had the experience will deny that he knew all along that the elusive truth was there; he knew the truth "intuitively," we say. In the Platonic metaphor (or anyway one likes to think it was a metaphor) he "remembered" it but remembered it indistinctly. He could not know what he knew until he found words for it. My example doesn't apply merely to intellectuals. People who talk about raising chickens, people who are unfairly accused of things they are almost but not quite guilty of, and people trying to show how they felt about that fellow with the beard in Florida have all been through the same thing. All understanding is an articulation of intuitions.

One way of saying what the artist's intuition is, is saying what it's not. Like the philosopher, the scientist, and the preacher, the artist bangs for the world's attention and declares with gusto and conviction, It's like this. Since Aristotle won and Plato lost, "philosopher" here means the analytical philosopher: a man whose intuition is that the world is, from end to end, structured. He may declare that he knows the key to the scheme and may then, in Whitehead's words (at the beginning of Process and Reality),

frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. ... By this notion of "interpretation" I mean that everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed, or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme. Thus the philosophical scheme should be coherent, logical, and, in respect to its interpretation, applicable and adequate. Here "applicable" means that some items of experience are thus interpretable, and "adequate" means that there are no items incapable of such interpretation.

Whitehead is describing the process of philosophical inquiry from Aristotle up to but not including Wittgenstein: the process of system spinning. Most contemporary philosophy reflects a revolution in philosophical method and expectation, but no change in the fundamental loyalty of the good philosophical mind. Some things are "inexpressible": one can know the definition of a red fire truck, and one ought to; one cannot know about total reality, one can only arrive at angles of vision, ways of trying to know. Broadly and inaccurately, for the old-time speculative philosopher reality is truth; for the contemporary philosopher you can't get there from here. Trivial modern philosophers leap to the mistaken notion that truth is not there, but this is a confusion of method and subject: it is true that the subject of philosophy is philosophical technique, but the purpose of the technique, whether this purpose is remembered or not, is to chase an intuition. For most modern philosophers, that grand old image of logos, the sun, has degenerated to a light bulb in a roomful of men born blind. The light is still on, the blind men assert with blind men's faith and disinterested pleasure, but they do not ask of one another such senseless questions as "What does it look like?" and "Is it friendly?" The philosopher's hunt for his intuition has, by and large, broken down; the horses have died, and the dogs are away chasing field mice. It is significant that those who still fight to continue the old, high pursuits—Paul Weiss, Roman Ingarden, Justus Buchler, for example— are virtually unreadable, their thought borne up by an outrageous, utterly exhausting labor of language.

The scientist, too, has a feeling that the world is systematic; what he loves, however, is not the total scheme of relationships but the mechanical connections. Reality, for him, is a system of formulas which come together, hopefully, in some super-formula, perhaps the quantum theory. Science, like philosophy, has suffered some troublesome reversals of late. The laws of thermodynamics don't work if you're small enough or large enough to slip past them. And that's the least of it. What is an honest man to do in a universe where cause need not always preceed effect or have any observable relationship in space? But science plunges on heroically, hunting for the wires that have got to be there, exposing the Great Magician's tricks; and philosophers, artists, and men of religion smile hopefully and give the scientist foolish suggestions.

The reality-hunter most like the artist is the man of religion—the man whose primary intuition is that the world is holy. Like the artist, he does not articulate his intuition by analyzing his way to a proof that what he guessed all along was right; instead, he tells a story. Reality, he says thoughtfully, is like this . . . and he makes up the story of Job, or of the dying Buddha, or of Achilles. As the figure of the poet-priest found in every old society makes clear, it is impossible to distinguish between the primitive artist and the primitive holy man. Cows and horses were the same thing in the days of the Devonian fish. If they differ now, it is because they have adapted to different functions. When a critic takes the story of a poet-priest, analyzes it and interprets it and insists that every word is literally true, a matter of doctrine and history, never to be altered, the poet-priest is reduced to a priest, and the critic is a theologian. If the critic, on the other hand, interprets the story as metaphoric expression of a philosophical idea, the poet-priest is made a poet. In their essence, in other words, the idea of holiness and the idea of beauty are one and the same. God, after all, is merely a word which the poet-priest uses to express a synthesis of feelings he cannot express otherwise except by telling stories, some of which are "true" (things he saw happen or heard about), some of which are fables.

To recognize the identity of beauty and holiness is to get rid of a confusion which has plagued aestheticians for centuries. Beauty is an apparently meaningless word which we continue to use because we understand it. Beauty is something that doesn't exist except in the instant it jars the soul and thus at once comes into being and attracts. Beauty is something that happens in life, but confusedly and unpredictably, and something that happens, infallibly, in true art. It is something that "gets across"—that is, makes profound but finally inexpressible sense, as Tillich says, "on the level of deep experience," whatever that means.

Let me try to make this less vague.

The primary intuition of the poet-priest is one of a particular sort of order, an order which is partly sensuous, made up of objects loved or hated, partly transcendent and abstract, a vague but powerful sense of the general classes of things which ought to be loved or hated; in other words, affirmed or blown to bits. What he loves the artist calls beautiful; what he hates he has no word for (not "ugly," or "grotesque," or "trivial," or "wicked"), he merely wants it out. He cannot get it out, of course. The best he can do is get it clear, know where the beautiful—all that is metaphorically summed up by the word life—connects with the not-beautiful; that is, with death. "Up" against "down," "light" against "dark." The artist who, like Samuel Beckett, claims the two are the same thing—so that the age-old intuition of the artist is a lie, just one more stupid illusion, and who therefore turns on all we have found "so wonderful!" and smoothes it over with sand—is in the same room as the blind philosopher, a room many artists of the present age find it hard to break out of. Yet as Beckett knows ("Where are you going?" "On.") the artist is not quite in the philosopher's predicament. It is impossible for art not to assert man's intuition of the beautiful, whether the artist knows this is so or not. It either asserts or it stops being art. Insofar as the long dead "Art Is Dead" movement felt like art, it denied its nihilistic premise. If it meant to offer an Aristotelian imitation of actual process (reality as pointless destruction), it failed in supremely Hegelian fashion: we deny, though perhaps with misgivings, that the artist has told the whole truth; we affirm, as perhaps he too does in secret, though he lies to himself, that second half of.the half-truth told by the artist. In the act of flinching from the nihilist's assertion, we make our opposing affirmation.

All this is to say that the artist can approach the beautiful in a thousand ways—by trying to imitate it straight, by painting its monstrous opposite, or in any of the wavs in between. As priest he tells what God loves and hates; as poet he drops the divine metaphor and stands himself as lawgiver. His fundamental sense, as he looks at life, is of glory obstructed: a glimpsed wholeness shattered. What gets in his way may lie outside him: a foolish and wrongheaded society, a vast spider web of maliciously misleading doctrine, or what seems to him an overwhelming tradition of artistic error, a tradition which has come to be barren and empty of what it was made to give life to. Or what gets in his way may lie inside him: the infuriating limitations of his own technique and mind, the fact that eventually he must die. In one case the artist's response may be to fight with all his heart the society, the doctrine, or the tradition which would kill him; in the other case, he does his ultimately inadequate best. He may consciously and systematically rebuild his technique, even his mind—may go so far as to drive himself insane, ceasing to be an artist, by burning himself in the zealot's fires of heroin or politics or sex. He may turn himself into a monstrously conscious and deadly imitation of the psychotic rapist or killer.

The passion of true art involves risks, one may as well admit. Like philosophers, scientists, and men of religion, even sane artists can outreach their society's capacity for understanding and become, for that society, intolerable. On the one hand, they are the spokesmen of a reality man cannot live without, whatever people may foolishly imagine; on the other hand, their zeal for a certain kind of truth can reach flat opposition to the civilization that has nourished them. The artist who, like Jean-Jacques Lebel, believes that art and society have come to "la guerre totale," understands that if he loses the war he will die. Nevertheless, the revolutionary artist has a great advantage over the society which, if he is right, stands like a high-pocketed pig surveying its ladies magazines and decorator lamps and Styrofoam chairs, unaware of the butcher on the landing. Yet the pig is better off than he deserves to be. Under the bed, with cunning eyes, machine-gun trained on the door, there is another artist to protect him. One of these artists must surely be wrong. How do we know which?

The sense of the beautiful or holy, which the artist and the man of religion share as their main obsession, has often been described—most eloquently by Immanuel Kant—as "independent of all interest." One must, according to this point of view, avoid confusing the beautiful with the agreeable, on the one hand, and the good, on the other. The agreeable, Kant says, is what gratifies a man; the beautiful is what pleases him; and the good is what man approves. To a grower of oranges, a picture of an orange grove is agreeable; he is hardly indifferent to whether or not real orange groves exist in the world. To a dying old lady, a picture of Christ emerging from the tomb is both agreeable and good: she is gratified that such things can happen, and she approves of the thought that something of the same sort may happen to her.

Since Kant is dead and cannot defend himself , let us raise questions. Say I have an orange grove, and say that I like art. What am I really looking at when I look at a picture of an orange grove? One possibility can be dismissed at once; I am not looking at an orange grove but at a picture; in other words, an opinion of orange groves, or anyway of one orange grove. As an orange-grove specialist myself, I have my own opinion, which, because I like art, I am trying to fit with the opinion of the artist. The oranges, I observe, are oranger than I would have expected, "Curious!" I muse. Perhaps I add, "IKs true!" In this case I am looking at what I take to be the artist's message, which I accept or reject. But if this is so, what I am really looking at is the indifferent question, How orange is an orange? I do not care what the answer is any more than I care how much seven and six adds up to; I merely want to know the right answer.

Now suppose the artist is a clever one whose oranges, as I fixedly stare at them, are sometime sensibly orange and sometimes blue. "Curious!" I muse again, and I began to distrust the oranges in my grove. What am I looking at now—the real nature of oranges, or technique, or both? Or am I looking perhaps at something larger, other experiences which shift in this same way? I am now, of course, reading a different message: things change. Or I am looking at a different indifferent question, To what extent is that thing stable? And I am satisfied with the ridiculous answer, That's a very interesting question. I am lying, of course. A question is only interesting while you think about it. But I have been driven to think about it, if only for a moment, and I am amused.

Now suppose the artist, who has the heart of a devil, says "Good!" and substitutes a different picture, one which, to infuriate me, he has meticulously copied (I know only by the card he tacks to the wall) from an ancient Burmese representation of an orange grove. Burmese monks, I for some reason happen to know, made a fetish of keeping all sign of the individual artist out of the picture. What am I to say? I could say that the new message is pure technique: the perfection of the copy. But I am leery now, I anticipate the artist's next move— the same picture carelessly done in feces and human hair. What I say therefore is, "Fraud!" But I do not really feel sure of myself. He is the artist, after all, and he tells me, with apparent sincerity, that it's art, or at least an attempt. He says he'll stake his life on it. "It's hanging in a museum, isn't it?" he says hopefully. We purse our lips, artist and viewer, and reflect. We glance at the museum director. He shrugs. "It's a business, Mac. Art is what people come look at to see if it's art."

All this is very discouraging, at first. But the museum director is smarter than he looks. When people stop coming to see if what is hanging on the walls is art, the reason will be that it is not. Either it never was art in the first place, or else it was and has stopped being. Patiently returning time after time, like believers to the cave of a dead oracle, and learning that nothing will happen there, they have quit. There is no more art, or in any event, no more art in museums. If this is so, beauty is a generalized human feeling (purity of heart) which is brought to focus and released by the art object, a thing as indifferent to beauty, in itself, as a radio tube is indifferent to the music of Schubert. Beauty in art, in other words, is the same thing as beauty in life: it happens in connection with certain objects and events, only in art it happens regularly, through the conscious agency of some artist, if only because it is expected. Art, like an addict's needle, is an instrument.

No one will be satisfied with that definition, or should be; but it brings us this far: we can answer Kant by saying that in our experience of the beautiful, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the representation is a matter of chance, a variable of no significance. It may be that in looking at a picture of a nude we find gratification interfering with the aesthetic experience, as it does when adolescents look at half-naked ladies by old masters; but it is also possible that gratification may, in a given work, be itself the aesthetic experience or its trigger. It may even be, in a particular work, that frustration is the aesthetic experience. This is art, we are told. We stare and stare, desperately hoping for some holy sign, but no sign comes. The desperate hope is the affirmation; the museum and the work are a shockingly expensive and cruel trick designed to make the affirmation rise. Not that this is a fair explanation of all contemporary nonsense art. And I do not mean either that all frustrating art is equally good, equally important. There are as many kinds of frustration, moreover, as there are kinds of human affirmation. It is one thing to be infuriated by a huge, square, uncut block of steel, another to be consternated by a stuffed ram with a tire around it. Neither frustration has anything to do with that which comes from looking at a dead human hand with an ornamental hat pin sticking through it. Before such monstrosities criticism flies. How can one say that they are good or not good? Yet one does. One can blindly intuit what the artist feels, and one can cry out—if only to see if it is true—"You fool! Fool! The pin should be longer!"

Art, we reply to Kant, sneaking along with fear and trembling (puns are fair), is not independent of all interest but beyond all interest. It is an affirmation of what ought to be and what, in the artist's devout opinion, is, whether or not it can be reached from where we are. For a grave-digger it is agreeable to see Antigone go out and bury her dead; for Nietzsche it is worthy of approval as a triumph of moral feeling over the merely social feeling of Creon. But neither the grave-digger nor Nietzsche looks at Sophocles' play with mere interest: they affirm, as feeling creatures, that even if there were no profession of digging graves, no possible recurrence of Antigone's problem, the dead should be buried; the dignity of life demands it. And even if science can overcome the inconvenience of death, and human beings can live forever, the play will be moving at least when understood in its historical context. It affirms an absolute one cannot turn one's back on, a beauty of feeling embodied in the life of a woman who stands as the figure of every woman's potential, every human being's potential, even a grave-digger's, even Nietzsche's.

I have obviously not said what kind of intuition is peculiar to the artist, though I have tried to creep up on it with stories; and I have not said what makes a twentieth-century artist different from a twentieth-century priest. These questions cannot be dropped because they help to explain the kind of articulation of the original intuition which proves satisfying to an artist.

The primary intuition of an artist, then, is that what is best in life, which he extends to mean what is best in all the universe, is "the level of deep experience." His experience, he means. Not the deepest experience of a philosopher (primarily an intellectual experience), but that of a man who, by chemistry, is doomed to be an artist. If philosophers are deeply moved by art it is because they are also partly, but not primarily, tuned in to the roar of beauty. The idea of beauty informs the experience of all human beings: some merely dip their toes in it, some wade out in it—as Alexander went out into the ocean to be thought a god—and drown. The artist's affirmation, or, more precisely, his search for affirmation, is the work of art. Thus all works of art are affirmations of the same thing: they differ from one another because they are different ways of trying to make the age-old affirmation, because every artist's mind and every age throws up its own impediments to affirmation, and because, finally, not all affirmations are equally intense or broad—in other words, not all artists are to the same degree or in the same way obsessed. The form that art takes, the quality of the artist's mind and civilization, and the intensity of diverse affirmations all fall on a scale which runs from slight to overwhelming, or from the "beautiful" to the "sublime."

I need not spell out all the implications of this statement. Let me jump to the fact that correct assessment of the pressure of an artist's affirmation cannot safely treat the work of art in isolation from its background: the tradition behind the work and the moment (time and place) of its appearance. A soap carving is one thing on a mantelpiece and another in a museum, one thing if its obvious purpose is to be a lovely trifle (a soap carving), another if it seems to stand as a cynical joke (a soap carving usurping the place of a statue carved out of granite). I am speaking now only of good soap carvings and good granite statues—works in which technique is adequate to purpose. (The artist who works at what he's trying to say so clumsily that he cannot get it said, and the artist whose statement is so much like everybody else's that nobody finds it worth listening to— these are frauds, apprentices, or fools.)

The most obvious manifestation of the scale from slight to overwhelming is the continuum which runs between those old misnamed categories, the beautiful and the sublime. If the beautiful is, as Edmund Burke said, the small, the curvalinear, smooth, and so forth, while the sublime is huge and angular and rough, then what Burke ought to have meant by the beautiful is the pleasant, comfortable, and relatively trifling affirmation (an ethical one, in Kierkegaard's terminology), and by the sublime he should have meant hard-won, defiant affirmations (moral). The first celebrates what can be domesticated and enjoyed, what makes life pleasant or can anyway be tolerated: a bowl of roses, a stuffed ram which, like us, is somehow obstructed and out of place, stuck inside a tire, but is willing, barely, to put up with the joke. The sublime, on the other hand, celebrates mankind's defiance—like Thor's—of the awesome powers which will one of these days destroy him: mad Lear fending off the powers of evil, or art's shrewd crackpots chopping up a car in Paris and spreading spaghetti on a naked girl. Lear and the Paris happening have only their kind of affirmation in common. Insofar as the two "works" are effective, the observer violently asserts himself against man's extinction by brainless Fate or the brainless mechanization of modern life.

Though they were once the same thing (the poet-priest), the artist and priest are now, as we've said, two different things. How the original separation came about is as follows. There was once a wise old poet-priest who had two sons, to whom he taught all his stories, all his dances, and all his magic. Each son was extremely bright in certain ways but in other ways stupid. The elder (it is sometimes mistakenly reported that he was the younger) was a literal-minded, intensely loyal person who believed all the stories and tried to live by them, They were helpful, for the most part, but sometimes they failed him, He worried about this and sometimes thought he would go out of his mind, and sometimes did, but then he discovered that he too could make up stories, really further elaborations of principles he'd learned from his father s stories without knowing it. He found, too. that sometimes new stories told by strangers illuminated dark places in his father s stories, He married an intelligent, literal-minded girl (the first analytic philosopher), and soon they had a son, who, at the age of twelve , became the first theologian. This son in turn interpreted his father s stories and made of their principles a set of laws. From then on all the people lived happily and confidently except now and then when something turned up suggesting that the original poet-priest’s stories were a pack of lies.

As for the younger of the two sons of the first poet-priest, he listened to his father's stories with extreme care and turned them over and over in his mind, not so much because they were useful or true (he supposed they must be more or less true, one way or another) as because they reminded him of everything he liked and made his feelings about things clearer to him, As he grew older he began to have feelings not covered by his father s stories. For one thing, he felt vaguely resentful of his older brother, who had risen to a position of power in the community and had vast herds of sheep and was married to a girl the younger brother blindly, foolishly loved. For another thing, he hated the way his brother and his followers told the old man's stories: they missed the point. He grew even more angry when his brother s son began turning the stories into laws, especially since one of the laws was that everybody had to work because work was "‘beloved of the gods.'’ The original poet-priest's younger son was a lazy oaf. if the truth be told. He grudgingly took up raising corn and, walking back and forth behind his ox, he played out in his mind little fantasies of what he would do if he ever got his brother's wife alone or found his brother walking in the woods in the middle of the night. Eventually, of course, it all came to pass. He found himself alone with his sister-in-law, and being too timid to seduce her he made up what amounted to a story on the subject of how he felt about her. She was more impressed than he could have dared hope, and when they met again she subtly led him into telling her certain parts of it again, with more feeling. One night her husband caught them together, and at a sign from the woman—a sign she did not know she gave—the younger brother slew the elder. They buried him, and as they were tamping down the dirt a voice yelled at them out of heaven, "Cain! Where's your brother?" They fled, naturally, and before long they had a son who listened eagerly to his father's stories. He had his father's indifference to their literal truth, his mother's penchant for analysis, and so, at the age of thirty-two or -three he became the world's first literary critic.

Whether or not this little history is true, it is clear that art and religion are now two separate things, even though the artist speaks of "holiness" like a preacher and preachers speak shamelessly of "beauty." And it is clear, though it may not be readily admitted, that artists are people who seek to understand through art, while preachers seek to understand by preaching. (A preacher knows more about religion when he finishes preaching a careful sermon than he did when he sat down to write it.) The articulation which satisfies an artist is directly analogous to that which satisfies a preacher: an interpretation of the experience of his own time and place, summed up in the person of the artist or preacher, developed through the medium of the whole tradition of, in one case, art, and in the other case, doctrine. The work produced by a mentally or emotionally limited artist is called bad art. The work produced by a mentally or emotionally limited preacher is called bad religion or heresy.

To speak of "tradition and individual talent" is to speak misleadingly, though not incorrectly. We would do better to speak of the convergence of tradition and the individual artist's moment. The artist is a man of maximum sensitivity, a man who sees and feels more things in more precise detail than do the people around him, partly because he has excellent emotional and intellectual equipment, including—above all, perhaps— the security which makes for shamelessness, and partly because he has special machinery for seeing and feeling: the tradition of his art. The man whose sense of beauty is most easily triggered by visual things can learn, if he wants to, the tricks of vision worked out by painters, sculptors, and the like from before the dawn of recorded history; a good musician can listen to the music of his time with the whole tradition of music in his head, not only Eastern and Western music but African and South American Indian as well. The man who understands by means of words has at hand, if he wants it, nearly all human language.

If tradition and individual talent, understood in the usual sense, were the relevant machinery, art would be better today than it has ever been before: we have not only our own great traditions but also those of cultures that used to be closed off—for example, Tibet—and we have talented artists. The artist does not extend his tradition by the force of his own personality or talent. Mechanical as a pipe fitter, he tries to find a way to fit his own experience (in other words, the feelings of his time and place) to the tradition of his art. To put this still another way, the medium of any given art is everything that has ever been done in it, or everything the artist is aware of in his tradition. The medium for the first sculptor may have been mud, but the second sculptor worked with a more complex substance: mud and his experience of the first sculptor's work.

Just now especially, the past and its art seem to comment bitterly on the present. Artists who come back from fighting modern wars find it difficult to speak with conviction of the gallantry and heroism of soldiering. Artists involved with the vast bureaucratic pork barrel called higher education are inclined to speak little of the beauty of wisdom. Feelings of skepticism about traditional values are the dominant feelings of the age, feelings the artist must find his way over or around or under if he's to make the affirmation which defines him. Even if some of these feelings are wrong, mere mistaken emotion—like the feeling of a lover who thinks he hears his lady coming, but it's only the mailman not bringing any mail—they are the driving emotions of men and women with whom the artist is involved and for whom he cannot help but feel a sympathy which ends up confusing him. They are the artist's only available subject. They are what he must paint or make music of. Somehow he must find a way to make people who deny that they are heroes, who may even insist that they are buckets of worms, fit as if naturally into novelistic situations designed for people who considered themselves heroes. What happens in art is that neither tradition nor the artist's own moment comes off unchanged. Tradition is stretched to make room for what it never meant to swallow, and the moment is forced to admit its relationship with the dead. Of course the less the artist knows about tradition—the greater his ignorance or stupidity—the greater the power of the moment, the less the intellectual and emotional testing of present fancy against all that has gone before. This is one of the reasons so much art today is bad. If he's not well-educated, wise, and careful, the artist who loves beauty and cannot find it in the world around him may give up the attempt to reaffirm, to raise nobility from the dead, and may satisfy himself with mere expression of his own disappointment, pain, and anger.

An artist is someone who believes in art, who believes that art reflects something which is real in life, who tries to see and reveal to others what life is in his own time by making it art. If he panders to his time, saying what his time says no matter how his art cries out against him, he is a witch, and dangerous: Tennyson, for instance, in his praise—or seeming praise— of what happened at the valley of death. If he panders to tradition, paying no mind to the howls and whimpers and giggles of his age, he is a self-righteous pedant and nostalgia-monger, an impediment to civilized progress.

What kind of articulation of his intuition satisfies the artist? The answer is, one which honestly feels to him like art and which people he tentatively trusts are willing to look at to see if it is art. Insofar as the artist's purpose is complex, not expression of a feeling so simple that a bold metaphor will do (a huge letter H made of railroad spikes welded to sheet metal) but expression of, say, his love for his children or his unpluralistic belief that one kind of life is better than another, the artist cannot predict in advance what form his work will ultimately take. Some novels are written for experiment's sake, but these are rarely novels worth reading. The true experimental novel, like Biely's Petersburg, or Beckett's Malone Dies, is one which achieves the form it does because it cannot otherwise say what is to be said.

When the artist has moved as far from the tradition of the novel as either of these novels has moved, he has nothing to guide him but his feeling as he writes, and again and again as he rereads his work, that it is still art; it still triggers in him the feeling that art triggers. He calls in the reader. The reader looks as honestly and carefully as he can (let us wishfully think), and in the end he says, "It's good," or else, "It stinks." If the latter, the reason may be that the work does stink. Or it may be, the artist knows, that criticism is getting in the reader's way: he is looking wrong. Or it may be that perverse social values are getting in the way—the reader does not appreciate the values the artist has recorded or celebrated and is not sufficiently disgusted by what ought to disgust him in the world. It may be, too, that the artist has simply jumped too far and cannot be rightly understood until a century or so has passed—Blake, for instance. But finally, it does not matter to the artist what judgment the viewer comes to as long as he looks. The man who blows up grand pianos is howled at from every side, "Fraud! Not art!" but what counts is that the crowd is there to howl, though it may not be there next time. Something happens to them as they watch the instrument blown up—some will even admit it. They experience a shock of terrible metaphor—"Grand pianos are in my way, the whole tradition is in my way, and you are in my way: I can say nothing, do nothing, affirm nothing because of the piano's intolerable high-tone creamy plinking, which you fools adore; I will therefore destroy them, I will destroy you all!" (Whether the destroyer is a sculptor, a musician, or a confidence man is somewhat difficult, in this case, to make out.) In a curiously similar way, marauding war-kings were in Homer's way. With the dynamite of epic tradition, developed in the first place to celebrate their names, he blew them to smithereens.

Not, again, that a dynamited piano equals The Iliad. You have to see a piano blown up to really get the metaphor, and the repeatability of the experience is somewhat limited by practical considerations. Besides, instantaneous metaphor, even if it manages not to be stupid—as this piano one is—is neither as clear nor as significant as the systematically extended metaphor of fable or musical composition.

I have still not gotten to the question, What makes some good art great and worth fighting over? Or, if all good art is an honest attempt, direct or indirect, at beauty-affirmation, why is only some art worth preserving? The intensity of the affirmation itself is obviously not enough to explain this. No one was ever as shaken to the bowels by anything in The Iliad as we are by the pure violence of seeing an artist allow himself to be shot, yet the experience of Thejliad has infinitely greater staying power. What counts is not the pressure but the inclusiveness and total energy of the artist's affirmation. Great art, like great philosophy, is metaphysical—but emotionally metaphysical. To paraphrase the passage I quoted from Whitehead earlier, it frames a coherent, convincing, necessary system of general ideas and feelings in terms of which every element of our experience is illuminated. The advantage of all arts over philosophy, as Croce understood, is that the metaphysics of art cannot break down. A logical system falls the moment any element of its logic is proved to be either wrong or arbitrary. An emotional system remains valid as long as people continue to feel that it is valid; that is, as long as when you prick them they bleed. It is true that we have learned in the past century that men's sensitivities can be changed or destroyed: men can be changed into monsters, as they were in Nazi Germany, or they can be indoctrinated by the subtle force of their society into conceiving themselves to be devoid of free will, as many people have been in the United States. It can be shown by infallible or at least official logic that values are all a matter of opinion, that what seems good in one culture (like eating babies to improve one's virility) seems unpleasant to another. It can be proved positively that everything is relative. But not to an artist.

By the nature of the case, the rightness of the artist is beyond demonstration, though there are curious evidences that it is sometimes real. If art is relative, a cultural matter, we should expect that people of one culture would be unresponsive to the best art of another, and indeed anthropologists have shown that they are. The music of Beethoven is obscene to most black Africans: bloated, disgustingly over-rich, and rhythmically simplistic. Japanese Buddhist art, similarly, seems unimaginative and trifling to most Americans. But with artists of diverse cultures this seems not to hold. When samples of mixed good and bad art from one culture are shown or performed for the artists of another, the artists of the second culture seem to be able to distinguish good from bad. Fascinating work on this has been done by, among others, Adrien Gerbrands of the Leyden Museum in Leyden, Netherlands. Playing European music for illiterate and untraveled but highly professional black African musicians, Gerbrands discovered that the Africans' judgments are surprisingly close to those that are for us musical history.

Whatever value we may wish to place on such evidence, the fact remains that in culture after culture artists have proclaimed repeatedly that art in some sense "tells the truth." Show the artist a Nazi Frankenstein monster and his reaction is simple—"Get it out!" Why one should get the monster out the artist may not exactly know, at least insofar as he speaks as an artist. The monster is an impediment, an error: he obstructs the path to beauty. The gods, Plato would say, have whispered in the artist's ear.

Art, in short, asserts an ultimate rightness of things which it does not pretend to understand in the philosopher's way but which it nevertheless can understand and show mankind. There are degrees of this showing. The artist who celebrates the trivial and tame—a pleasant sunset, a good Christmas dinner—reinforces what is trivially good in his society. He is brother to the artist who attacks what is trivially evil in his time: the comic poet, the satirist, the writer of musical jokes. A higher (but still not very high) kind of artist adopts the stance of his time and toys with it, suggesting indirectly the existence of something better, something truer. The contemporary chance composer is an example. He takes the prevailing notion of his time, that all life is a matter of chance (an idea which reduces the mind to mere substance), and he makes what he calls music of it. We listen to four radios, arbitrarily tuned, and to three or four musicians who, without consulting one another, struggle with their violins and horns and balloons to make sense of the chance noise. If the clued-in audience feels that some kind of sense is indeed emerging, even a new order of sensation, it has climbed above its normal, debased notion of man; if the audience hears only tiresome noise, it has at least the affirmation of its anger. The great artist, whatever the form he chooses, breaks through the limited reality around him and makes a new one. He says not "It surely can't be just this!" but "Listen, it's like this!" And makes it stick.

Every fair-minded person will readily admit that not all bad or mediocre artists should be dismissed from our republic. There is a place for the amusing poem, the John Cage joke (though God knows it wears thin), the Rauschenberg ram (which does not). A place exists for chance composition just as for jazz, which it brainlessly burlesques: a place for blown-up pianos. The place for such art, admittedly, is now—not all time. It will pass, like a chicken dinner or a bad cold.

But while the fair-minded person makes room in his world for the trivial, the temporary, even the intentionally or accidentally fraudulent, such goodness is a luxury no artist can afford—certainly no young artist hunting a place to stand—and no critic who cares about true art will tolerate. Wherever it appears, from the drivel of politicians to moronic styles of dress, from television chaff-art to the stentorian fraudulence of "innovative fiction" at its worst, the bad is an obstruction of the light, a competitor against good, a filth and a pestilence that must be driven out. Every chance composition purposely or accidentally backs a lie. If the chance composer writes a book in which he explains himself, solemnly intoning that life is mere chance—for all the raging evidence of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Einstein—then he doubles the strength of his poison. Every nonsense artist, destructionist, or painter of bruised entrails on a field of burning red is a plague carrier, a usurper of space that belongs to the sons of God. For the poet, Yvor Winters says, poetry is "his finest mode of thinking and perceiving, of being, of discovering reality and participating in reality." It is his life, in short. Who can blame him if he lashes out in fury at those who would offer substitutes?

That is why, despite his pathetic wish to seem a gentleman, the true artist rants and rolls his eyes, or blinds and numbs himself with drink, or careens from woman to woman or man to man, or shuts himself away and refuses to see guests. Like an angel trapped in hell, he has dangerous eyes.

The poet-priest had two functions: lawgiver and comforter. He had to know what laws to give, what comfort to give, what comfort to withhold as false. The poet has far less power now, but the job hasn't changed. He must affirm, comfort as he can, and make it stick. Let artists say what they know, then, admitting the difficulties but speaking nonetheless. Let them scorn the idea of dismissing as harmless the irrelevant fatheads who steal museums and concert halls and library shelves: the whiners, the purveyors of high-tone soap opera, the calm accepters of senselessness, the murderers. It is not entirely clear that these people are not artists. They may be brilliant artists, with positions exactly as absolute as, say, mine. But they are wrong. It's not safe to let them be driven from the republic by policemen, politicians, or professional educators. Officialdom would drive out all of us, which is one reason that when we come out shooting we should all talk with dignity and restraint, like congressmen, and wear, like Doc Holliday, vests and ties. Let a state of total war be declared not between art and society—at least until society starts homing in—but between the age-old enemies, real and fake.

4